The ocean is a vast place. And while we humans have managed to fill a lot of that vastness with garbage, it’s still large enough that cleaning it up would take an incalculable amount of man hours. If only we had some sort of mechanical slave to do our work for us.

The Marine Drone is just a giant basket that is dragged through the water by three battery-powered propellers. As it moves, the basket slowly fills up with trash. The drones–which coordinate with each other via sonar–return to a central location when they’re full, and their haul of plastic is loaded onto a ship for recycling.

Won’t these giant nets also catch a lot of fish? Elie.Ahovi says that the drones would emit noise to scare fish away. But it’s not a real concern yet, as the project is just a concept. But we’re going to have to deal with all that ocean trash soon, and better robots than us.MC